http://www.its-usb.com/blog/rss.php?w=new New Blogs in Its-usb.com. en-us Thu, 28 Aug 2008 21:22:37 -0500 Its-usb.com RSS contact@its-usb.com http://www.its-usb.com/blog/blog.php?bid=188 http://www.its-usb.com/blog/blog.php?bid=188 Happy 2008, lets hope this year can be a decent one and maybe the world can start to seriously address the issues of global warming, each year forward takes us closer to the brink. On a lighter side if you keep wanting to waste carbon, check this out Most thrill seekers would be well satisfied with a flight to the edge of space. But once Richard Branson's space tourism outfit Virgin Galactic is up and running in (probably) 2010 he plans something even more extraordinary. The company is exploring the idea of flying from Kiruna in the frozen far north of Sweden into the aurora borealis - the northern lights. No one has even sent a rocket with cameras on board into the ethereal curtains of winter light, let alone a person. Although the feasibility study into how the flights will operate has not yet been officially completed, the plan looks certain to go ahead and Kiruna is already marketing itself as Virgin's European base. Before Christmas, I visited Esrange, the Swedish rocket base that will act as mission control for Branson's flights.Now all I need to do is find £100,000 for a ticket. Happy New Year! Tue, 01 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0600 http://www.its-usb.com/blog/blog.php?bid=187 http://www.its-usb.com/blog/blog.php?bid=187 the co-founder of the Hotmail webmail service has released a web based software clone of Microsoft Office 2007 to compete with the Vole. Microsoft bought Hotmail for $400 million ten years ago. At the time, it probably didn't anticipate that the acquisition would help fund the design of a rival to its crown jewels, the Office suite cash cow that generates $20 billion annually, a third of Microsoft's revenue. Sabeer Bhatia calls his web based office applications suite Live Documents. He believes it can challenge Microsoft's dominant Office suite by being significantly less expensive, with a subscription business model that allows customers to avoid the high initial cost of Office. The software suite will be given away to individuals along with 100MB of free online data storage space. Companies can subscribe to use the software, hosted either remotely or in-house, for less than the cost of Microsoft Office. Its first customer has 6,700 employees. Live Documents was developed over four years by just 32 software engineers at Bhatia's company InstaColl in Bangalore, India. The company is backed by SoftBank's Bodhi Fund. Google Docs is another web based group of software as a service office applications like Live Documents. Released in February, Google's office suite already has major corporate customers, including CapGemini, General Motors and Proctor & Gamble, who see it as a lower cost alternative that handles both Volish and Open Document Format (ODF) files. Other free, local client based alternatives to Microsoft Office are the several ODF based offerings including open sauce Open Office, Sun's StarOffice and IBM's Lotus Symphony, all compatible with Microsoft Office, though that might not continue in the future as the Vole changes its formats. Live Documents is better than Google Docs and the other alternatives, Bhatia contends, because it closely imitates Microsoft's latest Office 2007. He believes office applications delivered as a service over the Internet is the wave of the future, due to lower up front and later upgrade costs. He said, "This will do for documents what Hotmail did for e-mail. Why spend $400 on an upgrade when you can get it for free?" "We are just a few years away from the end of the shrink-wrapped software business. By 2010, people will not be buying software," Bhatia said. Mr. Bhatia might be onto something with his Live Documents office suite, delivered as a service, but we're not convinced. The overwhelming majority of users of Microsoft Office haven't yet upgraded to Office 2007, and many might not for quite a while yet. There is significant resistance among Office users to the many user interface changes Microsoft made in Office 2007, and that will limit the appeal of Live Documents as an alternative for office applications. Then there's its dependence on Microsoft file formats, which the Vole changes regularly in order to disadvantage competitors and slowly force users through network effects to pay for expensive Office upgrades. Bhatia's potential customers can't be confident that Live Documents will keep up with Microsoft's future changes to its Office file formats, and since it doesn't support ODF files, they can't use it to migrate away from the Microsoft vendor lock-in of Office to ensure that their files will always be accessible. Google Docs has the first mover advantage and has already attracted recognition and the respect that comes with an impressively large early customer base. It has the advantage of being compatible with both Microsoft Office and ODF file formats, too. And Google certainly has the financial resources to persevere in an extended contest with Microsoft. We somewhat like the idea of office software as a service, but Google was there first and Live Documents is chained to the Vole, so we think it's going to have an uphill road to go. But then, maybe Microsoft might eventually just buy Live Documents, like it did Hotmail. Sat, 24 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0600 http://www.its-usb.com/blog/blog.php?bid=186 http://www.its-usb.com/blog/blog.php?bid=186 For illustration, we'll use the Six Nations match between Wales and Scotland in Cardiff on 14 February 2004, to describe the process. Step One: Check pre match ratings The top 10 countries in the IRB World Rankings, immediately before the match, are shown below. Wales were on a rating of 76.92 and Scotland slightly lower on 76.36. Step Two: Allow for home advantage To 'handicap' the home side, we treat them as though they are three points stronger than their current rating, which means that they will tend to pick up fewer points for winning, and give away more points for losing This gives Wales a rating of 76.92 +3 = 79.92, against Scotland's rating of 76.36.Step Three: Calculate the Rating Gap The Rating Gap is the difference between the ratings of the two sides Allowing for home advantage it is 79.92 - 76.36 = 3.56 (in favour of Wales).Step Four: Check the possible Core Rating Changes Core Rating Changes are based on the match result and the Rating Gap As illustrated in the diagram below, with a Rating Gap of 3.56, if Wales won their Core Rating Change would be up, and Scotland's down, by 0.64 Again as illustrated below, if the game was drawn, Wales Core Rating Change would be down, and Scotland's up, by 0.36 And finally if Scotland won their Core Rating Change would be up, and Wales's down, by 1.36. So Wales, as the higher rated side (especially allowing for home advantage) would pick up fewer points than Scotland if they won the match, and would give away more points if they lost. Step Five: Apply weighting factors If one side has won by more than 15 points, we multiply the Core Rating Change by 1.5. So if Wales won 30-10 the points exchange would be 0.64 x 1.5 = 0.96. If the match was part of the World Cup Finals, we would then double the Rating Change.What happened? Wales won the match 23-10, so the sides exchanged 0.64 rating points, with Wales going up to 77.57 and Scotland going down to 75.72. Fri, 19 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500 http://www.its-usb.com/blog/blog.php?bid=185 http://www.its-usb.com/blog/blog.php?bid=185 Halo developer Bungie Studios has announced plans to break away from Microsoft just one week after delivering the biggest video game launch in history. Bungie will once again begin the process of becoming an independent company after operating as a subsidiary of Microsoft since being acquired in June 2000. The move comes just days after the official launch of Halo 3 which smashed sales records and logged more than $300m in global sales in the first week alone. As part of the deal, Microsoft will retain the rights to the Halo franchise. The hugely successful first-person shooter series has been widely credited with helping to establish the Xbox 360 as a major games console. In explaining the move, Bungie founder Jason Jones likened the company's position to that of a shark. "We have to keep moving to survive," he said. "We have to continually test ourselves, or we might as well be dolphins. Or manatees." Both companies vowed to continue a publishing agreement which will include development of future Halo titles, as well as what was termed a " primary focus" on Microsoft's platforms. Neither company would elaborate on the agreement, but reports suggest that Microsoft will retain rights of first refusal to all future Bungie titles, allowing for early or exclusive release of games on the Xbox 360 platform. Mon, 08 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500 http://www.its-usb.com/blog/blog.php?bid=184 http://www.its-usb.com/blog/blog.php?bid=184 Intel announced USB 3.0 specification could push throughput beyond 4Gbps (300MBps) at the application level while introducing Quality of Service in support of HD video streams. Besides supplanting Firewire once and for all, a clear goal of the new "SuperSpeed USB" is to keep up with the transfer speeds of flash chips. "We don't want to be the bottleneck in the system," says Intel's Jeff Ravencraft who is overseeing the 3.0 initiative. Intel, HP, Microsoft, NEC, NXP, and TI will present the initial spec for a design review in November with first silicon to be stamped in "early 2009." While the new interconnect (pictured) will remain backward compatible with USB 2.0 and prior devices, new cables laced with an optical link and a max length of 2-meters will be required to take advantage of those high speeds according to a senior engineering manager with NEC. Meanwhile, a 1Gbps throughput is being targeted with Ravencraft's other baby: Wireless USB 1.1. Sounds great, but with existing 480Mbps Wireless USB silicon only achieving about 40Mbps in practice, Intel would be wise to focus on efficiency, not theory. Of course, it's all just a lot of smack-talk 'til they deliver, but with Apple running Intel inside now, Sony putting USB in their camcorders, and eSATA proliferating for external disks... well, Firewire's days sure seem numbered Thu, 20 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500 http://www.its-usb.com/blog/blog.php?bid=183 http://www.its-usb.com/blog/blog.php?bid=183 At one time the only mortals on the earth were men. Prometheus had made them, Athene had breathed life into them. The chief god Zeus did not like them. One day Prometheus was trying to solve a quarrel that was raging between the gods and the men. At a festival the men were going to sacrifice a bull for the first time. They asked him which parts of the bull should be offered to the gods and which should be eaten by men. Prometheus decided to play a trick on Zeus. He killed the bull, skinned it and butchered it. He split it into two portions, in one he put the best, lean meat. In the second he put bones followed by a thick layer of fat. Prometheus offered both to Zeus to take his choice. Zeus looked at both portions, one looked good but was rather on the small side, the other was much larger and covered in a layer of fat which Zeus felt must cover the best, tastiest portion of meat. He chose that one. When Zeus realised that he had been tricked he was furious. He took fire away from man so that they could never cook their meat or feel warm again. Prometheus reacted immediately flying to the Isle of Lemnos where he knew the smith Hephaestus had fire. He carried a burning torch back to man. Zeus was enraged. He swore vengeance and started making an evil plan. Zeus, set Hephaestos the task of creating a clay woman with a human voice. Hephaestos worked and worked and created a masterpiece. Athene, goddess of wisdom and Zeus' daughter liked the clay figure and she breathed life into it. She taught the woman how to weave and clothed her. Aphrodite the goddess of love made her beautiful. The god Hermes taught her to charm and deceive. Zeus was pleased with what he saw, but he had made her as a trap. He named the woman Pandora and sent her as a gift to Epimetheus. Epimetheus had been warned by his brother Prometheus that he should never accept gifts from Zeus because there would always be a catch. Epimetheus ignored his brother's warning, fell in love with Pandora and married her. Zeus, pleased that his trap was working gave Pandora a wedding gift of a beautiful box. There was one condition however...that was that she never opened the box. For a while they were very happy. Pandora often wondered what was in the box but she was never left alone so she never opened it. Gradually over a while she began to wonder more and more what was in the box. She could not understand why someone would send her a box if she could not see what was in it. It got very important to find out what was hidden there. Finally she could stand it no longer. One day when everyone was out she crept up to the box, took the huge key, fitted it carefully into the lock and turned it. She lifted the lid to peep in but before she realised it the room was filled with terrible things: disease, despair, malice, greed, old age, death, hatred, violence, cruelty and war. She slammed the lid down and turned the key again...keeping only the spirit of hope inside. Wed, 22 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500 http://www.its-usb.com/blog/blog.php?bid=182 http://www.its-usb.com/blog/blog.php?bid=182 Hotblack Desiato is the ajuitar keyboard player of the rock group Disaster Area, claimed to be the loudest band in the universe, and in fact the loudest sound of any kind, anywhere. So loud is this band that the audience usually listens from the safe distance of thirty seven miles away in a well-built concrete bunker. Disaster Area's lavish performances went so far as to crash a space ship into the sun to create a solar flare Tue, 14 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500 http://www.its-usb.com/blog/blog.php?bid=181 http://www.its-usb.com/blog/blog.php?bid=181 A smudge of driveway sealant resembling the face of Jesus Christ has fetched more than $1,500 in an online auction. The family that found the image on its garage floor sold it for $1,525.69 on eBay Wednesday, more than a week after the slab of concrete was put on sale. "I really never thought I'd get any, to be honest," said Deb Serio, a high school teacher. "It's fun to see what people say and think about it," said Serio, who has gotten hundreds of messages from around the world. The family has hired a contractor to remove the section of concrete. The chunk will be turned over to the winner, identified only as "islandoffthecoast." An active Lutheran, Serio considers the smudge just an odd occurrence ? not a sign or miracle. "There are some people who need this kind of thing to sort of start them on their faith journey. I don't," she said. "That's why I don't mind parting with it." Sat, 11 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500 http://www.its-usb.com/blog/blog.php?bid=180 http://www.its-usb.com/blog/blog.php?bid=180 A double, an identical replica of a person. The idea behind this is that everyone has a Doppleganger, an identical copy of themselves somewhere in the world. If the person is good, then the Doppleganger will be evil and vice versa. It is even said that if the two should meet, then they will both perish. Although there is no evidence that Dopplegangers exist, some people have actually reported claims of witnessing what they believe to be their Doppleganger. In all likelihood however, Dopplegangers are an aspect of myth only. Do you have one? Wed, 08 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500 http://www.its-usb.com/blog/blog.php?bid=179 http://www.its-usb.com/blog/blog.php?bid=179 Now why am I not suprised? There is a huge gap between the broadband speeds providers are advertising and those that users are able to achieve at home, research by Which? showed today.The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has previously said it is acceptable for broadband providers to use the words "up to" in their adverts, as long as most customers can get close to the advertised speeds. However, Which? claims that while many companies advertise speeds of up to 8Mbps (megabits per second) or faster, consumers are achieving an average speed of just 2.7Mbps, while some have experienced speeds as low as 0.09Mbps. The consumer group is calling on Ofcom and Trading Standards to investigate providers' claims, which it says are misleading consumers. "It is shocking that internet service providers can advertise ever-increasing speeds that seem to bear little resemblance to what most people can achieve in reality," said Malcolm Coles, editor of which.co.uk. "If it is unlikely you'll reach the advertised speed it should be made clear up front, so that you know with some certainty what you're buying." There are many factors that affect the speed of a consumer's broadband, including how far they live from the telephone exchange and how many people are sharing the same connection to the exchange. Speeds can also vary throughout the day, depending on how many other users are online. The ASA has taken action against companies that have been found to advertise much faster speeds than are achievable by most customers. Earlier this year, the ASA ruled that Be Unlimited had breached its codes on truthfulness and substantiation when it advertised broadband at speeds up to 24Mbps, which were unachievable for most consumers. Last September, Bulldog was forced to withdraw adverts for broadband speeds of up to 8Mbps after a similar ruling by the ASA. A spokeswoman for Ofcom said the regulator was working with the ASA to make sure advertising did not mislead consumers. She said there were rules in place to ensure adverts made it clear that the advertised speeds were the maximum available, but that the situation was being monitored. Fri, 03 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500